Engineering Experience: From York College to the White Mountain Apache Reservation

This post was written by Joshua Sims, a York College volunteer on our summer 2021 trip to Arizona.

Arizona is known for two things: being hot and being dry. The White Mountain Apache Tribe (WMAT) Reservation is not excluded from these Arizona stereotypes. The Highland Support Project (HSP) reached out to York College’s Civil Engineering students to try to help reduce impacts from this on the reservation, which is how I got involved with HSP and WMAT.

McNary, Az, located in the northern area of the WMAT reservation, is home to a small community garden. This community garden is used to grow some small plants via raised planters and a drip irrigation system. Unfortunately, the garden has no source of water on site. In order to water the plants, gardeners must drive down to a nearby lake, fill up a water buffalo (which is a water tank of sorts) and drive it back to the garden. Additionally, the garden is located in a field, with minimal shade for any workers. At one point there was a ramada at the garden providing shade for workers, but the roof had since collapsed. The engineering team that was working on this project (including me) decided that the best way to solve the issue of the shade and water shortage would be to replace the collapsed ramada with one that would have a rain barrel and the ability to collect rainwater. 

When figuring out what this would look like, we came up with the goal to keep it as traditional as possible to both reduce the cost of the ramada and keep the design one that the WMAT have experience building. In addition to designing the actual look of the ramada we had to perform structural calculations, figure out how large a rain barrel would need to be, and lay out a ‘how to’ construction guide in order to be confident that the design would work. All of these factors that we included in our design would have been much harder to determine if we had not had one very helpful opportunity.

The old ramada structure at the garden

Through HSP, I was able to go to the reservation and visit the site of the two projects. We had brought some surveying equipment along, and during this time we surveyed both project locations as well as looked at/ into potential future project sites. The equipment we brought to survey provides information on elevation and the location of each point (that we recorded). Using these we are able to create a topographic map of the area showing contour lines and elevations throughout the two project locations. This data, which we were unable to find before, can be used for future projects to help improve upon the designs, or provide better, more accurate, designs. Additionally, just getting boots on the ground to take pictures and record information about the site itself provides valuable information that we otherwise could not have found. For example, with our project, we knew they grew their plants in planters, but we had no information on the planters themselves. Once we saw the site and planters, we could figure out how much head (or water pressure) would be required in order to run their existing drip irrigation system.

Chatting with community members at our celebration dinner the last night of the trip